


Acubens

by ecotone



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: (ft. crabs), F/F, beach episode part two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-18 01:05:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11863431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecotone/pseuds/ecotone
Summary: On the fiftieth cycle, Lucretia goes for a walk.





	Acubens

On the fiftieth cycle, Lucretia goes for a walk. 

The planet they touch down on is empty; the coasts are lined with tall cliffs made of crystal, and the ocean is a dark purple-black, opaque and still. There are two suns, here, and Lucretia is struck by how far away from home the seven of them are. How they have been away from home for half a century, for almost two-thirds of her life. 

Lup sidles up to her as Davenport brings the Starblaster down on the sand. “Nice place,” she says, grinning. Her swimsuit is already on, her cape hanging over her shoulders like a beach towel. “Want to go see where we’ll be chilling for the next year?” 

Lucretia nods, grabs her sketchbook. She’s all caught up on her journals, anyway, and she’s been itching for some landscape studies that aren’t just the various rooms of the ship. Taako waves at them from the deck as they leave, sunglasses perched on his head. 

The beach is quiet, their only company a few pearlescent crabs that scuttle around their feet. There’s a few mostly-intact shells lying around, and Lucretia picks one up, settles it in the sand so that the light catches it, turns it a shining pink. 

Lup sticks her tongue out when she sees it, squatting so she can prod at it with her wand. “Ew,” she says. “Alien crabs are just as nasty as regular crabs. Big ocean spiders.” 

“Don’t poke a hole in it,” Lucretia replies, sitting down next to Lup, “I don’t really want to touch another one.” She flips through her sketchbook, finds a blank space alongside a few drawings of the voidfish. Yesterday, Magnus had seen them and written ‘FISHER’ in big block letters along the margins, alongside his own little drawing. 

“I won’t,” Lup says, but she leaves the crab shell alone, drags her fingers through the purple-blue sand. She picks up a handful, drags her palms against each other to hear the crystals grind together. “I never went to the beach back home,” she adds after a few minutes, “too busy moving around. Me and Taako always thought it might look like this- plus some trees, maybe, or a couple seagulls.” 

Lucretia hums, debates trying to wrangle a live crab to see how it moves. “I went a few times, when I was young,” she says. “It was always crowded when I was there, though. Nothing like this.” 

She turns back to her drawing, and Lup occupies herself with finding a few big seashells, throwing the biggest one into the surf. It skips twice before a wave catches it, drags it underwater. Lucretia glances up to watch it sink, wonders how many times the Starblaster can skip across the planes before the Hunger catches them- fifty, a hundred, a million. 

The rest of the crew joins them, eventually, when the suns are dipping below the horizon. The twins wade into the water, finding pearls and shells, Taako transmuting seawater to lemonade, sand to sugar. Magnus turns his carpentry skills towards making a sandcastle for the crabs, moat and all, then chases down a few to show them their new kingdom. 

Lup rejoins Lucretia on the sand after a few hours of swimming; by now, they both have crowns of seaweed, courtesy of Merle. She casts Light on the end of her wand, sticks it into the sand like a torch. Lucretia does the same to her pen, plants it next to Lup’s wand. Two miniature suns in the darkness, she thinks, the third set so far. 

“Next time we hit civilization, I’m cooking a crab,” Lup says, watching one crawl by her legs. “There’s too many of them in the universe. I’m doing us all a favor.” 

Lucretia laughs, doodles another voidfish alongside a half-finished sketch of two figures standing in the ocean. “I should learn how to cook, sometime. Just in case you and Taako both die, and everyone that’s left is stuck eating soup for a year.” 

“A soup-only diet is good for your constitution, y'know.” The stars above them are bright in the way they only are on empty worlds, so Lup lays down, frames them with her fingers. “I’ll give you a few pointers, though. It’ll be a learning experience for all of us.” 

Lucretia shifts so that she’s lying down, too, staring up at the strange constellations. She keeps star charts in her room, makes a new one for every planet they reach. There are a thousand unnamed constellations across dozens of galaxies and she names them all, after her friends, the worlds they’ve lost, odd places from home that she has no other way to remember. 

“We’ve all learned more than I thought we would out here,” she says after a while, once the other five have left for their beds, once the fire’s been put out and the lights on the bridge have dimmed. “I can’t tell if I feel thirty or eighty.” 

“A little bit of both, I think,” Lup replies. “I can’t believe it’s been fifty years already.” 

“How long will we keep going?” Lucretia turns to look at Lup, dimly aware of the sand in her hair. “I can’t imagine doing this for a thousand years.” 

“You’d be out of space in your room, after a thousand years,” Lup laughs. “It’s been fifty and you’ve already taken over the storage closet.” 

“I just want to make sure our history is recorded,” Lucretia argues, even though she’s smiling too wide for her annoyance to sound real. “We have to remember it all somehow.” 

“I will cherish those crab pictures for the rest of our continued existence,” Lup says, sitting up to pluck her wand out of the sand. She hands Lucretia her pen, then lays back down, holds her wand up so that it looks like the sun is still up, burning overhead. Lucretia does the same, because after fifty years this strange abandoned planet is the closest she’s felt to her first home. 

When they sneak back onto the Starblaster, voices hushed in the quiet of the early morning, her penlight glowing behind her ear, she figures this place is just as important, just as treasured.

**Author's Note:**

> It only took me a year to finally post a taz fic, oops. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! :) Comments are appreciated, as always. My taz sideblog is @ gayhurley if anybody wants to chat!


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